The invention relates to providing personalized digital content.
Digital content, especially in the form of encoded pieces of music or encoded video clips, is at present being distributed over the Internet to a steadily increasing extent.
When buying digital content over the Internet, some suppliers use some Digital Right Management DRM system—like the one disclosed in WO 2004/070538 A2—to protect digital content. In such a system, digital content is personalized before it is sold to a particular individual, meaning that the digital content can be reproduced by the party to whom it is sold but cannot be accessed by any unauthorized party. The personalization may comprise encryption, watermarking, fingerprinting or any other suitable encoding of the digital content that depends on the party or group of parties intended to use the digital content. In this context, a party can mean either a person or a device.
To efficiently enable personalization of digital content, the content distributor needs identity credentials at the time of purchase. The identity credentials may comprise any of the following: user identity, device certificates, credit card number, computer serial number, or pseudonyms.
At the moment it is not possible to give personalized digital content as a present. Instead, it is possible to buy a digital cash voucher which can then be given to someone. The party that has received the digital cash voucher can exchange it to get digital content of his or her choice equal to the value of the voucher. Usually, a digital cash voucher is valid only in the particular store that issued it. The well-known content providing system, itunes Music Store of Apple Computer, Inc. uses such a system, for example.
A problem related to giving a digital cash voucher as a present is that the party giving it cannot have enough control for which particular digital content the digital cash voucher will be used. The party giving a digital cash voucher as a present may furthermore feel that the present is impersonal. The party receiving a digital cash voucher needs to select digital content and perform some further acts it in order to get the digital content, which is clearly elaborate. It is assumed that at least partly because of these aspects, it is still more popular to give digital content in the form of a CD or a DVD as a present.
EP 1 416 406 A1 a licence information converter is taught with which a first licence information generated by a first content distribution system is transformed in that way, that is passable to others.
US 2004/00119801 A1 discloses a method and a system for secure content sharing in digital rights management environments.